Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has been engaged in a fierce dispute with French publisher Hachette, demanding that the publisher cut their 45% take of e-book sales by 10% and give that to the authors, while simultaneously urging the ceiling on e-book prices to fall 50% from $14.99 to $9.99. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) believes this would account for a 1.74 times increase in sales of e-books, blessing all three parties with more money, and leaving customers happy with cheaper book prices.
Author’s Guild President and longtime author Roxana Robinson weighed in on the Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s e-book pricing dispute during an interview with Bloomberg this morning, and took aim at their position and some of those claims.
“What Amazon is trying to do is take control of basically the book market and also trying to take control of e-book prices and trying to devalue them. So that is something that they shouldn’t necessarily have control over. Everybody who makes a product should have the right to price that product at a place where they can make a profit,” she said.
Robinson further disputed Amazon.com, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) claims that a drop in e-book prices would result in such a drastic increase in sales, and cited the fact that Amazon has shown no studies or data to back up their claims, or what books were used to generate those figures.
“Readers buy what they want to buy, it doesn’t really matter that much what the price is. What Amazon wants to do is devalue the product so they can have more sales. It’s not good for writers to have their product devalued,” Robinson added.
Robinson called Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)’s behavior in the dispute “threatening” and “intimidating”, and says there was no need for it, with Hachette authors now being caught in the middle of a dispute they never asked for.
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